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Twitter is Going into Meltdown as Five Top Employees Leave the Company

by Paul TamburroJan 26th, 2016

Image Credit: Bethany Clarke / Getty Images

Twitter is suffering from an identity crisis. With news that the stock of the social network is rapidly on the decline, and the revelation that the company is looking at expanding its 140-character limit to a whopping, potentially unsightly 10,000 characters, now it has been announced by CEO Jack Dorsey that four of the company’s top executives and the head of Twitter’s video-sharing app Vine have left their roles.

The employees who have left Twitter are Kevin Weil, Katie Jacobs Stanton, Alex Roetter and Skip Schipper, while Vine’s Jason Toff is leaving his position at the company in order to join Google, a company he had previously left.

Dorsey made the announcement via Twitter, seemingly before he had told the site’s other staff members, posting the following tweet:

Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: pic.twitter.com/PcpRyTzOlW

It is unclear what this spells for the future of the site, but it doesn’t look good. The social network has struggled to drastically increase its audience in recent years, and has been unable to maintain investors’ confidence. This mass departure has not helped matters, causing its stock to fall following Dorsey’s announcement yesterday, with its shares dropping by almost 5%.

Twitter has been subject to numerous changes over the past few months as Dorsey moved into the CEO position in July 2015, following Dick Costolo’s departure from the company. Dorsey, the co-founder of the social network, implemented the network’s new Moments feature, which allows users to keep up to date with news stories as they unfold, and has also attempted to ease current Twitter users into the idea of increasing the site’s long-standing 140-character limit for its tweets.

Dorsey has obviously attempted to sugarcoat these major departures from the company, though five top employees each bidding Twitter farewell is in no way a vote of confidence for where the social network is heading in the future.